Never gave up: After 47 years, Terre Haute Chief of Police Shawn Keen announced that the department had solved the 1972 murder of Pamela Milam during a press conference on Monday at Indiana State University.
Tribune-Star/Austen Leake

Finding the family tree: This grid shows how DNA technology company Parabon's 'Snapshot Kinship Inference' produces inferences about the familial relationship between two people based on their DNA, even if they are distantly related. The method can detect relatedness out to fourth cousins. The analysis has uncovered previously hard-to-get information from crime-scene DNA samples.
Courtesy Parabon Nanolabs

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One tool used to identify the culprit of an 46-year-old unsolved
murder in Terre Haute has unlocked dozens of other cold-case crimes
across America in the past year.

In the Terre Haute case, genetic
genealogists used DNA technology to create an uncanny sketch predicting
the suspect’s appearance, trace a family tree to narrow the
possibilities to one man, and then identify him by comparing crime-scene
DNA to that of his relatives.

Similar methods were deployed by
genetic genealogists in cracking 55 unsolved crimes since DNA technology
led to the April 2018 arrest of a suspect in the Golden State serial
killings of the 1970s and ’80s.

“I
think it is a revolution in crime fighting in the United States and
probably, eventually beyond,” said CeCe Moore, the lead genetic
genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia, the firm that’s
assisted in those 55 cases. Moore’s work included the Terre Haute case.

Of
course, the gathering and tracking of the clues and evidence involved
more than a decade of tireless, meticulous police work by Terre Haute
Police Chief Shawn Keen. In 2008, Keen — then the chief of detectives —
personally took on the case of Pamela Milam, a 19-year-old Indiana State
University student whose body was found in the trunk of her car on
campus in September 1972. The criminal who assaulted and strangled
Milam, then left her bound and gagged in her vehicle, was never
identified.

That is, until Keen’s painstaking years of pursuing justice led him to connect in 2018 with Parabon.

Its
researchers projected a suspect with blue or green eyes, blondish hair
and light skin. Parabon also crafted a genetic profile of a suspect,
comparing it to information on a public genetic genealogy database, GEDmatch.com,
and tracked his identity by constructing a family tree. Keen and the
THPD took it from there, locating the surviving widow and sons of a man
who died in shootout with Kokomo police in 1978.

The sons’ DNA samples matched, with a 99.9999 percent probability, that of Jeffrey Lynn Hand — a man with a violent history.

Keen
announced the discovery of Milam’s murderer at a news conference on the
ISU campus on Monday. Two of Milam’s sisters praised Keen’s dogged
investigation and regular contact with their family. Keen thanked
several people who assisted law enforcement, and explained the intricate
genealogy work that uncovered Hand’s identity.

The next day, the
55th case resolution involving Parabon was announced in Seattle, a
sexual assault and murder from 1967. Testing determined a man, who died
of diabetes in 1987, was responsible for the rape and strangulation of a
20-year-old woman, Susan Galvin, The Associated Press reported. It
marked Parabon’s oldest “solve” to a cold case crime.

The fact
that the suspects identified in the Terre Haute and Seattle cases had
both died long ago left Moore, the genetic genealogist involved in the
investigations, with mixed feelings.

“That’s always good and bad,”
she said by phone Thursday from Seattle. “It’s good to know that a
person hasn’t been out there hurting other people, living a great life.
But it’s also always disappointing that you can’t get justice, or that
the family won’t be able to get any answers beyond just who it is and
the possible circumstances.”

Applying genetic genealogy to law
enforcement cases is just the latest facet of the work by Moore and her
colleagues. They’ve helped adopted people find biological parents,
orphaned people to locate families, and other genealogical services.
Viewers of the popular PBS television show “Finding Your Roots” might
recognize Moore, whose skills help unlock family lineage mysteries of
the program’s guests.

To help identify perpetrators of long-ago crimes, Moore and the
Parabon team analyze crime-scene DNA in ways that make it compatible
with genetic genealogy analysis. Apples to apples, in DNA terms. They
can access a public genetic database, GEDmatch, to which people — often
adoptees or people with unknown parents — upload their DNA. GEDmatch has
1.2 million participants, and its website alerts users that law
enforcement can access the information, too, Moore explained.

Questions
about privacy are familiar turf for Moore. “I’m very used to the
question of sensitivities and privacy and dealing with family secrets
and perhaps telling people things about their families that they don’t
want to hear,” she said. “So this is just another step in that
direction.”

The genealogists assisting crime investigators can’t use DNA databases of services such as Ancestry.com
and others, Moore emphasized. They do, however, use those sites’
public, digitized records, she added, along with old-school genealogy
resources such as Census records; marriage, birth and death
certificates; newspaper archives; and the online White Pages.

“We have to use all of [those tools],” Moore said.

“It’s
pretty intensive,” she said, “but fortunately me and my team have been
doing this for almost a decade for adoptees, and it’s the exact same
technique, and we can do it pretty quickly.”

Its recent adaptation
to criminal investigations, including the cold-case resolutions of the
past year, have surprised the general public more so than genealogists.
“I think for law enforcement, for the public, for those that weren’t
exposed to what we were doing earlier, it’s probably very shocking to
see that with, really, relative ease you can identify these suspects
from years- or decades-old cases,” Moore said.

“So as long as
there’s no negative court rulings or any legislation that restricts or
bans its use, then we should be able to help resolve many thousands of
court cases and even active cases in the coming years,” she said.

Moore
felt a personal connection, of sorts, to helping solve the case in
Terre Haute. Her son’s late father, Dr. Kris Ghosh, grew up in Terre
Haute. Ghosh died unexpectedly, at age 46, a few years ago. Later, Moore
visited the city, including his high school.

“This case was definitely a special interest for me,” she said.

Resolution
of such cases also affects the families of persons wrongly suspected of
those crimes, sometimes lingering under a cloud of suspicion for
decades. Each of the 55 cases Moore and Parabon have helped solve had a
long list of “persons of interest” among the suspects. Only one of those
hundreds of suspects actually ended up being the perpetrator.

“Now
that these cases are finally being solved, and the real suspects
identified, a lot of people feel a weight lifted off their shoulders and
their reputations,” Moore said. “I think that equally as important as
getting the right guy behind bars is getting the wrong people cleared.”